Make your lecture recordings searchable by topic

Why lecture archives go unused

Recorded lectures are long, similar-looking and named by date. When a student asks about a concept from week four, or you want to reuse last year's best explanation of a proof, the recording exists but finding the right twelve minutes means scrubbing.

Students have the same problem. A searchable course archive is far more useful than a playlist of ninety-minute videos.

There is also the reuse question. If you teach the same course every year, you have likely explained the hardest topic several different ways. Some of those explanations worked much better than others, and without search there is no practical way to compare them.

What instructors do now

Each of these helps a little. None of them lets you ask one question across every lecture you have recorded.

• Chapter markers added by hand. Helpful, and rarely kept up past the first term.
• Platform auto-captions. Many lecture-capture and video platforms generate captions. They help inside that platform, but they don't search across years of your own files, and recordings live on the platform's servers.
• Slides as a proxy. Finding the slide and then guessing when it was on screen works, roughly.

Search by what you said and what was on screen

MediaFind transcribes each recording on your computer and also reads on-screen text from the video frames. That second part matters for lectures: slide titles, equations typed on slides and terms written on a projected screen become searchable along with your words.

So “where I explain eigenvalues with the spring example” or “the slide titled Market Failure” both return the recording and the second it happened. Per-file summaries and chapters break a long lecture into skimmable parts, and a names and terms list keeps subject vocabulary spelled right.

Reuse and share what you find

• Cut a found segment out as its own clip, or trim it in Create, the built-in editor, where you can remove silences and filler words and add titles.
• Export transcripts as SRT or VTT captions, or as Word, PDF or text study notes.
• Ask questions across a term's lectures, such as “which week covered confidence intervals?”, and get answers that cite each recording and timestamp.
• Photos of whiteboards are indexed too, and searchable by the text in them.

Setting up a course archive

Once a couple of terms are indexed, comparing how you explained the same idea in different years is a single search. That is useful for revising a course, and for picking the clearest version to share.

1. Put each course in its own folder, with one subfolder per term if you teach it repeatedly.
2. Add course vocabulary, names of theorists and technical terms to the names and terms list before indexing, so transcripts get them right.
3. Add the folders. New recordings dropped in later are picked up about once a minute while the app is open.
4. Tag lectures by unit or topic, and save searches for concepts students ask about most.

Student privacy

Class recordings often include students asking questions or presenting. Keeping transcription and search on your own machine means those recordings aren't sent to another service just to make them searchable. MediaFind uses no account and uploads nothing; check your institution's policy on where class recordings may be stored.

For a single course, the free plan's ten-file limit is a reasonable test. A multi-year archive needs Pro's unlimited indexing.

If you'd like to try it first, the tutorial walks through adding a folder and running your first searches.

Frequently asked questions

Can I search lecture videos by the text on the slides?

Yes. MediaFind reads on-screen text from video frames, so slide titles and other visible words are searchable along with what was said.

Can I make captions for my lecture recordings?

Yes. Export any transcript as SRT or VTT, which most video players and course platforms accept.

Can students search the archive?

MediaFind runs on your computer and searches your library. It is designed for your own use rather than as a student-facing course platform; you can export transcripts and clips to share.

Do recordings get uploaded to be transcribed?

No. Transcription and search run locally, and the app works offline after a one-time model download.